Democracy for the Middle East: The Times Has A Jewish Problem

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Democracy for the Middle East

October 02, 2002

The Times Has A Jewish Problem

A recent article in the New York Times about the changing make-up of New York's Jewish population offers a glimpse into the mindset over on 43rd Street. Reporter Joseph Berger's wary depiction of a "diverse" and once "vibrant" New York Jewish community now being overrun by a "monolithic" group of "strict", "black hat" wearers who have a "high birth-rate" and "low-incomes" amounts to little more than a collection of thread-bare cliches. The article's value is thus limited to what it reveals about the religious paranoia at The Times. Whether this lapse in objectivity is related to feelings about the religious, religious Jews, or both is difficult to say. While the answer is probably both, we will confine our discussion to the paper's well-documented Jewish problem and try to show how it has led to journalistic oversites that have national security implications.

We should begin by recalling that the owners of The New York Times, the Ochs and Sulzberger families, are descendants of Rabbi Isaac Wise, the foremost Reform Jewish leader of his time and the founder of the movement's influential seminary in New York. As described by historian Michael A. Meyer in "The Origins of the Modern Jew", the movement to "reform" Judaism that started in Germany in the late 18th and early 19th centuries frequently found itself in heated conflict with those within the community who were either traditional in orientation or focused on re-establishing the Jewish state. (To be fair, these groups didn't see eye to eye either.) Reformers diagnosed the community's chronic "otherness" to be the source of most of its problems, and prescribed assimilation into European culture as the remedy. (Here one finds the roots of modern day Reform attitudes towards Jews who wear distinctive garb.) Moving well beyond the red-lines of the past, many Reform leaders actually converted to Christianity and justified conversion as a legitimate path. For example, David Freidlander (1750-1834), asked to be admitted to the Church but not required to accept Christ, and we understand that most of today's Sulzberger clan (including Times publisher Arthur "Pinch" Sulzberger) actually identifies as Protestant. Reformers also looked to the Church for their normative model of religious worship, and made adjustments to the newly dubbed "Mosaic tradition" accordingly. Arising as it did after centuries of extreme religious persecution, and in response to Europe's provisional consideration of emancipation for its Jews, many would argue that the Reform Movement's perspective on the supposed deficiencies of normative Judaism amounted to nothing more than the worst case of Stockholm Syndrome on record. Whether or not there are parallels to be found here with other cases of Stockholm Syndrome such as Patricia Hearst's, it's fair to say that Reformers came to identify with the values, beliefs and social norms of those who persecuted them and upon whom their lives depended.

Nothing better illustrates the ambivalence, if not outright hostility felt by the assimilationists towards their traditional brethren than the instances where Reformers reported on the religious activities of the latter to the state authorities. The following excerpt from the Grunfeld introduction to Samson Raphael Hirsch's Horeb (Soncino Press) speaks for itself:

Things took their worst turn in the community of Frankfort-on-Main, which used to be a citadel of observant Judaism. The Council of that ancient Jewish congregation brought all the strength of the secular authorities to bear upon those of their brethren who still tenaciously clung to the execution of their religious duties... By the machinations of that Council it became an indictable offense, checked and punished by the piloice, to teach the young the Bible in Hebrew and the Talmud. Teachers and scholars actually hid themselves in lofts and other hiding places when studying these subjects in order to elude the tyrannical powers of the Jewish Communal Council. But the latter was on the alert; the hiding-places were discovered; the teachers were banished from the city, and those men who had undertaken the care of providing the means for pursuing these studies were forbidden to do so under the penalty of fifty florins each."

While this was rare, it demonstrates the extent to which Reformers viewed the traditionalists as a threat to their newly won positions within European society. Most Reformers may have hoped for the survival of Jewry in some form (and often displayed exemplary generosity to their non-Reform brethren), but the overt hostility of others to the maintenance of the Jewish community as a distinct entity arguably found its culmination in Arthur Hayes Sulzberger's effective cover-up of the Holocaust and his campaign to prevent the establishment of a Jewish sanctuary in the Middle East (documented in Yoram Hazoni's "The Jewish State").

Which brings us to the present moment. By reporting on matters about which the owners of The New York Times harbor a long-standing religious bias, without informing readers of the conflict of interest, the paper does itself and its readers a disservice.

With regard to the paper's conduct during the Holocaust, it's time for the Sulzbergers to come clean about what they knew and when they knew it. This singularly tragic moment was documented by Harvard's Marvin Kalb in his 1996 lecture on The Journalism of the Holocaust (and more recently by former Wall Street Journal reporter Laura Leff in Buried By The Times.) Perhaps Professor Kalb's most illuminating observation is that the disinterest of the Jewish-owned Times in the loss of Jewish life during the Holocaust set the bar for other American newspapers and contributed to the effective press cover-up of the cataclysm.

The Times' holocaust reporting has never received the public scrutiny it deserves, and it may be for this reason that its anti-Jewish bias continues unabated to this day. Indeed, the case can be made that the distorting lense of anti-Judaism led directly to America's vulnerability on September 11th. For had the first victims of Islamic hegemonism not been the Israelis, and had America's overly-influential newspaper of record not been The Times, our journalists might have provided a more accurate picture of the growing threat in the Middle East. After a half-century of Arab calls for the genocide of the world's only Jewish state it should have been apparent that something was badly off. Not only did the Times do little to expose the danger, it told its readers that the second attempted genocide of the Jews in the modern era was a "conflict" between two morally equivalent parties - the so called "Arab-Israeli conflict." One has to wonder whether a thorough examination of the paper's archives would also turn up the phrase: "Nazi-Jewish conflict." Here is an excerpt from Professor Kalb's seminal lecture:

The New York Times [...] also failed in its journalistic responsibility during the war. Not that it didn't cover the war -- it did, with an exceptional and costly burst of energy and professionalism; it simply did not cover the Holocaust; and to this day the people who run (or have run) this great newspaper are baffled and embarrassed by this extraordinary omission. The logo of The New York Times read and reads "All The News That's Fit To Print," but during the war The Times, which was and is so special to American journalism, knew much more than it printed about the Holocaust; and what it did print, it printed, as a rule, inside, cut, often trivialized. What was the reason?

Here things get very complicated. Arthur Hays Sulzberger was publisher during the war. According to family history, his ancestors came to America in 1695. Two were among the Jewish notables of Newport, Rhode Island, in 1790, when General-turned-President Washington visited their synagogue. Not surprisingly, Sulzberger considered himself to be a member of the establishment, an American, who just happened to be Jewish. During a trip to Palestine in 1937, he confronted the reality of zionism, and it profoundly discomfited him. "Never have I felt so much a foreigner as in this Holy Land," he later wrote.

On his return to New York, he found that his old fears of divided loyalty led him, to quote journalist Peter Grose, "to minimize, if not ultimately deny, his Jewish identity." Sulzberger helped found the anti-zionist American Council for Judaism, which Isaiah Berlin called "an assembly of mice who say that they will bell the zionist cat." Interestingly, The Times gave this splinter group as much coverage as it gave to all the other Jewish groups combined -- and much, much more than it gave to the Holocaust.

Sulzberger, as high brow among American Jews as Bernard Baruch or Walter Lippmann, was an ultra-assimilationist, a civilized man who simply wanted to avoid being categorized as a Jew. Baruch, denounced by the Jew-baiting Detroit radio priest, Father Charles Coughlin, as "the uncrowned King of Wall Street," fled from too close an association with Jews. Lippmann, one of the great figures in American journalism in this century, frequently criticized Jews as "rich, vulgar and pretentious." He suggested that Harvard limit the enrollment of Jews. He dismissed Hitler's antisemitism as "unimportant," adding that the German leader was "the authentic voice of a genuinely civilized people." From 1933, when Hitler came to power, until 1945, when Hitler was destroyed, Lippmann never wrote a word about the Holocaust, never once mentioned the death camps.

In The Times, the murder of millions of Jews was treated as minor-league stuff, kept at a proper distance from the authentic news of the time. For example, on July 2, 1944, The Times published what it called "authoritative information" to the effect that 400,000 Hungarian Jews had been deported to their deaths, and another 350,000 were earmarked for similar action. This news was published as four inches of copy on page 12. The Times was making a statement with editorial judgments of this sort, and other editors, other reporters, other news organizations, all took their cues from The Times. Everyone knew that its foreign coverage set the standard. A perception then spread that if the Jewish-owned Times covered the Holocaust in this skimpy manner, then so could they, with impunity. The Times's foreign editor during the war was Ted Bernstein, described by a colleague as "a brilliant Jew running away from his roots."

Was it then any surprise that Jewish news, other than the Holocaust, was also shortchanged in The Times; that bylines, such as A.H. Raskin and A.M. Rosenthal appeared, rather than Abraham Raskin and Abraham Rosenthal? Cyrus Sulzberger, a columnist covering the war, used his clout as a member of the family to discourage the hiring of too many Jewish reporters. Daniel Schorr said that he was told in the early 1950s that he would not be hired by The Times, because there were already too many Jews on the paper.

Readers may also want to review the DFME posting: "The French Are Not A Nation"

Home . Posted by Editor at October 2, 2002 07:03 AM . DFME's new internet address is www.dfme.org

Comments on this post:

I am a Jew by birth and not by choice.

After reading this article, I'd like to present a view of current day Jewness that has helped to increase a growing anxiety felt by many non-jews toward us.

When OJ's trial was going on, I felt uneasy discussing it with my co-workers and friends who were African American.

The reason that many non-blacks found the subject so difficult to bring up around their black counter-parts was this. The need of the black community to protect other blacks is still very central to their brother/sister connection. The need to promote group survival and band against the oppressors is so great that even when the issue may clearly reflect a crime on the part of a fellow black, it is nearly impossible to see the prosecution of the individual as true justice. It is rather seen as bigotry and prejudice delt by the power structure.

I wanted to just shout to every African American in earshot, "by blindly defending someone who so clearly is guilty,simply because they are of your specific race or cultue, you are helping to promote the ire of those in the community who truely strive to rid themselves of any residual racism and truely want a culture devoid of judgement and choice by color.

The collective white guilt for having ancestors who enslaved people is a festering wound that can never seem to heal. Sometimes when you think you've overcome the sins of our society, something like OJ's trial happens and the scab on the wound gets ripped off exposing the painful spot.

It's like, I don't want to think of you as different because of your color but you won't let me accept you as just a whole, valuable, human being. You insist that I think of you as a black human being first."

Now about our jewness. I see the same mindset happening here as well. It's as if when anyone is critical of the settlements or of fundamentalism in the Jewish community, one is then branded antisemitic.

Well, try to draw the correlation beteen the two situations and see the similariaties.

I find myself frutstrated by the attitude of fellow jews who defend the settlers demands for the right to take land that can only be maintained by blood battles. It's the same feeling that some people are only defending the crime because to denounce a fellow jew is disloyal even if it means honoring dishonesty.

How sad. How frustrating.

Posted by: deeannemoore at May 5, 2003 08:03 PM

the last poster is a self hating jew, if indeed she/he is jewish at all... all they want to do is disapear into the goyesher ether (im secular by the way) but very proud to be a yahudi and will give my life for the settlers...those who protect our very interests in our very soil.

Posted by: anon at September 15, 2003 11:15 PM

do you really have an inside depth to the proplems in isrealo

Posted by: chris at February 6, 2004 03:17 PM